(The following article is a guest post! We thought it would be useful to anyone who wants to wear a costume in a parade, especially since some of the larger conventions have costume parades that people can participate in!)

They say everybody loves a parade, but you can quickly become the exception that proves the rule if you choose to march in a costume that is uncomfortable or inappropriate for the weather. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to make marching in even the longest parades a pleasant, memorable experience. While your local search might provide you with limited options, with enough planning you can build your own costume or special order pieces to open up a whole new world of possibilities. Before selecting your costume, decide to be a savvy participants and make sure you considered these top four questions for choosing the best costumes for long parades:

Does the Costume Accommodate Comfortable Footwear?

Whether you are marching or walking, taking part in a long parade can be demanding on your feet and ankles. Hard, asphalt surfaces and uneven pavement can quickly start you down the path to a night full of aches and pains. Keep this problem at bay by selecting a costume that accommodates comfortable footwear. Avoid high heels at all costs, and if you can, line your shoes with soft, comfortable gel inserts.

Is It Appropriate for the Weather?

In most locations, a skimpy costume made from wispy fabrics will be a poor choice for a parade scheduled for a brisk December afternoon. Similarly, in the summer, a full-body sports team mascot outfit with a fully enclosed mask could lead to heat exhaustion or worse. Fortunately, during hot weather you can often keep yourself cool—even in the bulkiest outfits—by choosing a costume that includes an internal fan. You can do plenty of research online, include searching sites like buycostumes.com Halloween costumes for inspiration and planning. Beyond your costume, make sure that you wear appropriate clothing underneath.

Is It Made of Breathable Fabrics?

Even in cold weather, you can quickly work up a sweat as you proceed down a parade route. In the summer months, getting hot in a costume is a given. Wearing breathable fabrics will help keep your temperature regulated as well as keep you comfortable and free from chafing. Both your costume and the clothing you wear underneath it should breathe easily. While a detailed latex mask or accessories might be tempting, remember that they will hold in moisture which could make you miserable.

Does It Pass the Run Test?

Complicated, spectacularly adorned costumes can be a real temptation when you want to make an impact on parade viewers. Unfortunately, if they are not put together carefully, they can easily make walking uncomfortably or cause you to look like a disaster. Imagine trailing your accessories along or having a critical piece of your outfit fall off en route. To avoid this, try using the “Run Test.” Put on your costume and move or run vigorously for a minute or two. Anything that comes loose or falls off needs to be removed from your costume and reattached securely. A successful run test can keep you comfortable and looking as good at the end of the route as you did at the start of the parade.

Marching in costume in a parade should be a fun, memorable experience. Choosing the wrong outfit can make that an unlikely outcome. When deciding what to wear, apply a healthy dose of common sense. With a little searching, you can find any number of costumes that will “wow” the crowd and without making you miserable.

It seems there are more and more people each year who keep quiet about their cosplay costumes for Blizzcon and other conventions. I never did before; I was never shy to let people know what I was doing as far as costumes go. However, you may have noticed that this year, I haven’t said a word about what I’m doing for my Blizzcon costume.

Some people don’t announce their costume because they don’t want it to get ‘stolen’. Well, honestly, unless that costume is something of your own creation, I don’t see the reasoning in that. If it’s a tier set or a plain old NPC in game, even a boss, if people have seen it, they’ve thought about cosplaying it. I have no problems with people cosplaying the same thing as me. Why?

I’m confident in my abilities as a cosplayer. Mario and I strive to make everything we do as accurate as possible, we take our time, we do months of research on new techniques. I wouldn’t have cared if there were six other Witch Doctors last year at Blizzcon (there weren’t, but it was a crazy costume to attempt anyway), because none of them would have looked exactly like mine. People would have done the mask differently, the hair differently, everything would have their style, their techniques.

You can try to ‘claim’ a costume- I’ve seen it happen a few times over the years- but that gets you nothing but rage when someone still cosplays the same thing. There’s no reason to think that everyone in the cosplay community knows who you are, or that people will even care enough to not cosplay whatever it is you’re doing. It’s better to just be confident in what you’re doing, be confident that everyone has different styles and ways of making costumes.

I haven’t announced what I’m doing yet because we’re working with a ton of new techniques. None of the techniques we’re using for this costume is anything we’ve ever done before, and there is still a lot that could go wrong.

Granted, our new motto is ‘if it’s not broken into a million pieces or on fire, it can still be finished’, but there’s one step in our costume making that, if we screw it up, we’re back to square… two. Not all the way back at the beginning, but we’ll have lost lots of work, and honestly, at that point, I’m not sure if it can be saved.

So. Instead of saying ‘when we get so many likes on our Facebook page, we’ll announce what I’m doing’, I’m saying ‘when I get to that point in my costume that I know we can pull it off, I’ll announce what I’m doing’.